[5] There also exist francophone communities outside those regions, including Notre-Dame-de-Lourdes, St. Claude, Sainte Rose du Lac, and St.

A number of francophone fur traders married à la façon du pays, wedding First Nations wives whose children eventually developed a unique Métis identity.

[7] In 1869, the government of Canada dispatched surveyors to survey Rupert's Land, with the transfer of the territory expected to occur in the next year.

The provisional government provided a list of terms for the colony's entry into Canadian Confederation, including land provisions for the Métis, and linguistic and religious rights for its francophone Catholic population.

[9] However within the next ten years, francophones became a demographic minority in Manitoba as settlers from Ontario moved into the province in large numbers.

[10] In the same year, the province moved to eliminate its separate school system, used predominantly by the francophone Catholic population of Manitoba.

[11] The following act was passed in an effort to homogenize the province with English as its dominant language, after it received an influx of migrants from non-English speaking countries.

[11] After the Thornton Act was passed, the Association d’éducation des Canadiens français du Manitoba (AÉCFM) was formed by the Roman Catholic clergy, serving as a shadow ministry of education for Franco-Manitobans.

[11] Francophone teachers who were able to continue teaching the French language were largely aided by the fact that the trustees of several school boards were effectively francophone-controlled.

[5] An issue regarding the province's official language emerged during the late 1970s, when a francophone Métis received a parking ticket written only in English.

However, the provincial government continued to move slowly in re-instituting bilingual programs, resulting in another Franco-Manitoban to use his own parking ticket to launch a legal challenge that all legislation from 1890 to 1979 passed only in English were unconstitutional.

[13] Another supreme court decision in 1993 ruled that francophone minority were afforded the right to manage and control their own educational facilities.

[15] Conversely, the Société de la francophonie manitobaine serves as the main advocacy and lobby group for Franco-Manitobans.

[11] French was reintroduced as an official language of the public education system in 1970, with Franco-Manitobans given the right to control and manage school boards independent from their anglophone peers in 1993.